The Iron Game eBook

CHAPTER IV.

Guelphand GHIBELLINE.

The shifting of Jack’s company to the regimental
camp in Warchester left a broad gap in the lines of
the social life of Acredale. Jack’s going
alone, to say nothing of the others, would have eclipsed
the gayety of many home groups besides his own, in
which the Sprague primacy in a social sense was acknowledged.
Since the influx of the new-made rich, under the stimulus
of the war and Acredale’s advantages as a resort,
there were a good many who disputed the Sprague leadership—­tacitly
conceded rather than asserted. Chief of the dissidents
was Elisha Boone, who, by virtue of longer tenure,
vast wealth, and political precedence, divided not
unequally the homage paid the patrician family.
Boone was fond of speaking of himself as a “self-made
man,” and the satirical were not slow to add
that he had no other worship than his “creator.”
This was a gibe made rather for the antithesis than
its accuracy, for even Boone’s enemies owned
that he was a good neighbor, and, where his prejudices
were not in question, a man with few distinctly repellent
traits. He delighted in showing his affluence—­not
always in good taste. He filled his fine house
with bizarre crowds, and made no stint to his friends
who needed his purse or his influence. He had
in the early days when he came to Acredale aspired
to political leadership in the Democratic party.

But Senator Sprague was too firmly enshrined in the
loyalty of the district to be overcome by the parvenu’s
manoeuvres or his money. His ambition in time
turned to rancor as he marked the patrician’s
disdainful disregard of his (Boone’s) efforts
to supplant him. Hatred of the Spragues became
something like a passion in Boone. Sarcasms and
disparagement leveled at his social and political pretensions
he attributed to the Senator and his family.
All sorts of slurs and gossip were reported to him
by busybodies, until it became a settled purpose with
Boone to make the Sprague family feel heavy heart-burnings
for the sum of the affronts he had endured. It
was to them he attributed the whispered gibes about
his illiteracy; his shady business methods; the awful
story of his handiwork in the ruin of Richard Perley,
the spendthrift brother of the Misses Perley.
Once, too, when he had so well manipulated the district
delegates that he was sure of nomination in the convention,
Senator Sprague had hurried home from Washington and
defeated him just as the prize was in his grasp.
The Senator made a speech to the delegates, in which
he pointedly declared that it was men of honor and
brains, not men of money, that should be chosen to
make the laws.

“The time will come, Senator, that you’ll
be sorry for this hour’s work,” Boone
said, joining Sprague at the door as he was leaving
the hall.

“How’s that?” the other asked, with
just the shade of superciliousness in the tone admired
in the Senate for suavity. “I hope I am
always sorry when I do wrong, in speech or act; I
teach my children to be.”